The best worst year

Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s question: “What 1994 pop culture would you want to experience again for the first time?”

Just up the street from our house in Oak Park stands the middle school that my daughter will attend in about ten years. Whenever I push her past it in her stroller, I whisper: “Honey, I apologize in advance.” I’m kidding, but not entirely. Middle school is hell for just about everyone, and although this fact is widely recognized, it’s unclear what can be done. When you throw kids from ages twelve to fourteen together in one crowded arena, you’re going to get conflict: everyone seems stranded at a different stage of maturity or development—physical, emotional, and intellectual—and along with these changes comes the impulse to take the first tentative steps at defining one’s personality. You find yourself worrying for the first time about whether you’re wearing the right clothes or listening to the right kind of music, and you receive urgent messages to conform even as you start to figure out who you really are. The result is a nightmare for most kids with anything resembling an individual point of view, and in some ways, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over it, even though my life since has been exceptionally happy.

Yet I don’t think I’d be the person I am now without what I went through in the years 1993-1994, which have started to seem like a weird hinge moment of my life. I’ve spoken before about what happened to me around the age of thirteen: I discovered Borges, Eco, and Douglas Hofstadter in quick succession, dove deep into David Lynch and The X-Files, and that summer, I wrote my first novel. But if 1993 was my headlong plunge into peculiarity, 1994 was a kind of course correction. I started to notice that I wasn’t much like anyone else around me—I still remember a classmate’s incredulity when I told him that my favorite band was The Art of Noise—so I decided to do something about it. Other factors conspired to push me in that direction. For a while, we had both MTV and Spin at home, and I studied both closely. I walked past a record store on the way home from school every day, and I bought a copy of The Downward Spiral from the same cashier from whom I’d earlier purchased Very by the Pet Shop Boys. And once I was able to take the train to Berkeley on my own, I saw a lot of movies, many of which have stayed with me ever since.

As a result, I feel an intense range of emotions when I think back on the pop culture of 1994. It’s possible that any year would seem similarly charged if you were thirteen or fourteen at the time—it’s an age when you’re particularly susceptible to being permanently shaped by whatever you encounter—but it also happens to have been a shared moment in which the culture as a whole was working through similar issues. By now, it’s a cliché to talk about the alternate visions offered by Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction, and also a little misleading: Forrest Gump was an eccentric, ambitious, technically exquisite kind of entertainment that we don’t seem likely to see again. But the movies and music produced that year do seem to engage in a tricky triangulation between indie crediblity and popular success, or, if you prefer, between alternative and mainstream. The acts of appropriation extended in both directions, and its breakthrough figure was Quentin Tarantino, whose style was based on his ability to give a unifying form to a dizzying collage of influences. (As David Thomson wrote much later: “Anyone as blessed with a sense of movie shape might get away with knowing nothing else.”)

And it’s no accident that I owe Tarantino thanks for championing my favorite work of art from 1994, although I didn’t encounter it until the following year: Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express. I first saw it on another foraging expedition: I’d found that my local Chinese channel showed subtitled movies every Friday night, and they were invariably more inventive and energetic than anything else on the air. Chungking Express was even more special. Today, it feels very much like the product of its time, and I fell in love with it the moment I heard Faye Wong’s cover of “Dreams” by the Cranberries. But there was something particularly lovely, and personal, about its refusal to shoehorn its two stories into a conventional shape, whether by adding a third installment or by connecting them again at the end. (I remember being deeply concerned by the possibly that Brigitte Lin might reappear to shoot Tony Leung.) As I’ve noted elsewhere, a movie with three stories feels like a closed triptych, while two stories feels as open as life. And it taught me something I’ve tried to remember ever since. It’s possible to have it both ways, to be true to yourself and to the world you occupy, as long as you have sufficient energy, imagination, and love.